David Tenser, 100%.

Firefox 3.5 — Upgrading the web once again

If you haven’t already, be sure to visit the coolest sub-domain of mozilla.org so far: hacks.mozilla.org.

The site was created to demonstrate what will be possible to do in Firefox 3.5 using open technologies. That is, technologies that are part of web standards like JavaScript and HTML — not proprietary plugins owned by single companies like, say, Flash.

As many people know, Flash is by far the most popular plugin on the web today, where the most obvious example of a website using it is YouTube. Replacing Flash as the technology for playing videos on YouTube with modern, open web standards would actually be very straightforward. The only catch is that there are too many people using old browsers that are not supporting these web standards yet, like Internet Explorer.

One way of solving this would be if everyone switched to Firefox 3.5 as soon as it’s released a few weeks from now. Or, web sites could be designed so that both Flash and Open Video formats are supported during this transition period when people are upgrading their browsers. Incidentally, that’s exactly what SUMO will do…

Anyway, I’m really impressed with what’s possible to do on the web today using just standards. My hope is that web developers will start to utilize these new, powerful, and fully open technologies to accelerate the advancement of the web even further.

My favorite technology demo so far is Content Aware Image Resizing. It just blows me away that a thing like that is possible with just JavaScript!

Be sure to upgrade your browser when Firefox 3.5 is released. Not just because it will be the fastest Firefox yet, but because it will make the whole web better.